Provision 8

Many health and health system issues cannot be addressed by one discipline alone. Nursing must collaborate to achieve the profession’s broader and more complex goals. Collaboration includes networking, advocacy, leadership, and diplomacy. It occurs among nurses and other healthcare and non-healthcare disciplines, recipients of care, the communities that are impacted by specific issues, the general public, and elected representatives. Nurses collaborate at many levels to address institutional, community, and legislative challenges. Collaborative efforts for nurses focus on diverse issues such as healthcare system problems, planetary health initiatives, and policies and laws that threaten health equity. The complexity of healthcare requires collaborative effort that has strong support and active participation of an interprofessional team and involves the recipient of care. Collaboration optimally requires listening, mutual trust, recognition, respect, transparency, shared decision-making, accountability, and open communication among all who share concern and responsibility for health outcomes. It extends to everyday relational ethics when intraprofessional, interprofessional, and nurse-patient collaboration is necessary. Nurses are uniquely positioned to elicit patient’s values, beliefs, and wishes and communicate them to the team. Collaboration also includes collective advocacy, leadership, transformational change, leverage of nursing expertise, amplification of voices that are typically silenced, and construction of a shared understanding that includes the unique perspective of nurses. Partnerships and networks created by multiple disciplines and communities enhance collective power to address issues that require a bold approach.

Nursing organizations and relevant parties have a moral obligation to address workforce sustainability. Academic institutions, healthcare agencies, businesses, and policy makers must collaborate to consider the wide spectrum of healthcare delivery systems, from urban medical centers to rural communities. Nursing, with its partners, should ensure the education and distribution of nurses to sustain the nursing workforce. Systemic solutions must be central to any discussion about improving staffing and nursing education. Sustainability initiatives include shared governance, workplace safety, transformational leadership, and the implementation of evidence-based transition-to-practice programs. Workforce shortages occur at all levels of nursing and place insurmountable pressure on the profession. Collaboration is essential to alleviate the burden placed on nurses working within an under-resourced and complex healthcare system.